User:Uncle G/On sources and content

The underpinnings of Wikipedia's sourcing and content policies
  • Wikipedia takes no sides in debates. It has no opinion.
  • Readers must be able to check all content against sources outside of Wikipedia.
  • Everything in Wikipedia must have been through a process of fact checking, peer review, publication, and acceptance into the general corpus of human knowledge. This process occurs outside of Wikipedia.
  • The goal of the project is an encyclopaedia, not something else.

Wikipedia has several basic sourcing and content policies. Of them, the Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View, Wikipedia:Verifiability, and Wikipedia:No original research policies are not fundamental to the nature of an encyclopaedia. Indeed many well-known encyclopaedias have no such policies. They are, however, necessary consequences of the organization that develops, publishes, and maintains Wikipedia, and of the way that Wikipedia is written. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and its ancillaries are fundamental to the nature of an encyclopaedia.